If a company built a tool like Copilot to help students write essays, is that considered plagiarism? Probably yes, and the reason is that regurgitating blobs of text without actually thinking like a human and writing them anew doesn't feel like actual work, just direct re-use.
Same thinking probably applies to GitHub Copilot and copyright
There is something fascinating about this article, and it's not the tips about how to properly work hard, which aren't new or particularly insightful (otherwise reasonable and well summarized).
It's the fact that throughout the article, hard work is an implied imperative in life, the main thing to do (otherwise it brings a "feeling of disgust"), without questioning if that's healthy, right, or so absolute. Maybe instead of the how, I was expecting something about the why, a reflection on the bad aspects of working hard too, and its associated costs on other parts of one's life, whether it's Paul, Patrick or Bill.
Google changing the country in their terms of services without user explicit approval/opt-in is much worse than it seems.
As a user, I might have Germany as my country in Google while living in Malaysia: maybe I like its privacy law better, or I'm a German ambassador on a diplomatic mission, or a German citizen on an exchange program, or a Malaysian citizen who signed up for Google while on vacation in Germany and is now confused about some parts of their account.
The point is, only the last scenario needs some fixing, while in all other cases, the user will understandably prefer to keep the country unchanged. Yet Google forcibly and preemptively switches country in all these scenarios, with no real benefits to the user.
But if there is no real benefit to the end user, and not everyone wants this, why force this change in the first place? Something technical that has to do with local laws.
And that's where it's really bad:
- It's bad as a principle, because if a person signs a contract with an entity under a specific jurisdiction, that person doesn't expect the jurisdiction to change unilaterally.
- It's bad in practice, because instead of knowing with certainty that my data is under a specific jurisdiction, I'm now subject to some automated process that could unilaterally move my data to a random country, resulting in unintended exposure to its laws
Free market includes when competition can reasonably enter a market that's not structured through legislation to be overly favorable towards incumbents.
Note that there are natural monopolies/oligopolies, which are the result of the nature of the market (eg need for scale) rather than legal lobbying.
Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)
Same thinking probably applies to GitHub Copilot and copyright